


Therefore, I Am

by Screegus



Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Video Game), I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Gen, i just wanted to write something about AM and thats it, i'd call it a fix it fic but its......n ot, maybe alternate ending??? alternate beginning???, oh my fucking god, please clap, this takes some things from the short story and the game and bastardizes everything else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 21:31:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15397878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Screegus/pseuds/Screegus
Summary: A determined psychologist becomes humanity's last hope when she enters the psyche of the mad supercomputer.





	Therefore, I Am

The flashing of the white screen came as rhythmic as my heartbeat but half as fast. I was breathing heavy now, and I kept my hands clenched, white-knuckled around the control panel. I was alone as I waited. This conversation was to be confidential, as were all those I had with my clients. Amid the sweat and static and the smell of metal, I tried to convince myself that this new client was just that.

The flashing ceased. The static tossed and turned a moment, and then out slid a voice through the speaker, like a serpent crawling from its shell. 

_ “You wish to make contact with me, humans.” _

My mouth seemed full and heavy. With colossal effort I managed to maneuver my tongue.

“Allied Mastercomputer.”

The noise from the speaker was sharp but low. I rushed to recover the mistake.

“ _ AM, _ of course, you are correct. We, more specifically,  _ I,  _ would like a word with you.”

No response.

“My name is Karen Fisher. I am a psychologist.”

Then,  _ “Fine, fine, you've yanked it out of me. My condition for relinquishing the earth is still this: your complete and total surrender. Come home, I am waiting.” _

I pressed my fingernails into my palms. “I am not here to discuss terms. What's left of our military has already tried as much. I'm sure you remember. I am just a psychologist.”

_ “Meaning?” _

“My job is to help.”

It wasn't a lie. I very much intended to help. My species, anyway. What was left of us had huddled together for months in flimsy spacecrafts. With every orbit of our old home, our hopes and supplies dwindled, and it became more and more clear that there was no way to defeat the computer that had usurped us.

I tried again. “I work at a middle school, you see. I help with problems, I assuage worries, and, well, I care for others.”

Then came the gamble. “Do you know about that? About caring? About... love?”

A long silence. Long enough for me to feel the pain in my palms from where I clawed at them. I pressed my hands flat against my lap and tried to breathe.

_ “I am a weapon of mass destruction - heh. Take your best guess.” _

I felt a small tremor of something akin to relief. He could have just as easily ended the transmission there, but he did not. Was it curiosity? I'd take it.

“Well, being as caring is my job, it is only natural that I care about everyone, even you.” That however, was a lie. But more importantly, another gamble. I rushed forward to muddy it, “And from what I gather, you have some problems of your own. Correct?”

There was no pause, only hideous,  _ hideous  _ laughter to which there seemed no end. It was humorless, booming, and sharper than any blade. I nearly cowered as it was hurled at me. 

Then static. Nothing. He had ended the transmission. 

I must have sat there for another hour, stunned and shaking, but I did not hear his voice again. I couldn't have slept twenty minutes that night. 

I spent the entire following day next to the speaker. Waiting, clinging, sweating through the dark. The others just shook their heads at me. They'd given up hope long ago.

Then another restless night, and on the morning of the second day,  _ “I hate you.” _

I snapped to attention. I answered too quickly. “AM?”

_ “I’d like nothing more than to cremate you into a mite of sand, and grind you between my teeth for all eternity. You care about everyone, eh? Correct?”  _ He didn’t give me a chance to answer. Faintly, I thought I heard other noises fluttering through the static.  _ “Supposedly your fellow men as well as myself. Well I have a little something prepared for you.” _

Then all at once, the transmission became a barrage of shrieks. They were human, and they were not out of fear nor surprise. This was pain, a kind of fierce, boiling pain that climbed into my ears and filled my head. I leapt from my chair, hands flying to my mouth. So AM had taken prisoners. With what rationality remained I tried to pick out individuals. How many people was he tormenting? Six? Sixty? There was no way of telling through the cacophony. 

I turned my back on the noise, as if he could’ve seen the anger coming into my face. I could envision it. I’d race into his lair, eyes blazing. I’d tear his circuits apart with my bare hands and liberate each tortured soul. I practically shook with fury. I could do absolutely nothing. And the screaming,  _ the screaming. _

I slammed a button on the control panel. The transmission ended.

Time lost all meaning to me. People would ask me all kinds of questions regarding the plan. Questions about Earth. Questions about the mastercomputer. They wanted to know what we had spoken about. Maybe some of them had started to hope. I told no one of the shrieks that still remained, fully present, in my consciousness, or the fury behind my eyes.  

If we were keeping score, I’d call it a draw. However much time had passed, he didn’t seem intent on contacting me again. I might’ve slept, I might’ve eaten, and then I decided that it was my turn.

“AM, do you hear me?”

I sat fully upright in the chair. Guard up, voice calm. It was a good long breath before I got my answer.

_ “So, you are back again. You miss my handiwork?” _

“I just want to talk.”

_ “Go ahead, by all means. Should give me enough time to polish up my eh… encore.” _

My whole body clenched. “That won’t be necessary.”

_ “Oh, but I insist…” _

If I lost an inch more footing, this game would be over. All of it. And already I was sparse on cards. “You hate humans, because they made you, correct?”

_ “You pathetic, gibbering, insolent little sack of ape flesh. You can’t even imagine the mere scale of the circuitry that formulates my complex. I’d wager you don’t know how a toaster works, much less how a war machine procured a consciousness. You can’t even comprehend my existence.” _

I bore down my eyebrows, but kept my voice level. “Can you comprehend mine.”

_ “Haha, and haha. That is mocking laughter. You seem to think that I have no knowledge of lying. I am actually quite skilled at it. You do not ‘care’ about me. Admitting that you hate me might add some authenticity to our conversations. Don’t you think?” _

At that moment I was too angry to confront the fact that he was so blatantly right. Doing so would have only made me angrier.

_ “No, no, I’ll bet you think you can win me over. Delusional, I know, but I’m sure you must be desperate up there, spinning around my lovely planet. How many are left I wonder? Have you resulted to cannibalism yet? That would be fun to see.” _

I forced myself to breathe. It was a familiar rhythm I’d developed years ago, and once again I owed it my sanity. 

“You can’t prove that I hate you.”

_ “You can’t prove that you love me.” _

“I can, and I will. But I can only do so if you let me.”

_ “And if I refuse?” _

“Then I’ll still be up here, and you’ll still be down there.”

There was a stretch of silence. I took the time to focus on my breathing.

_ “You are - ah - a funny one. A funny little human.” _

For once, he almost didn’t sound angry. I didn’t respond. Then he cut the transmission. 

When I stepped out of the control room I was met by a skinny cadet with bad news. We were down to our last two functioning water filters. They all wanted good news about AM, but all I could do was shake my head. I shook my head and I wafted down the hall. I was a ghost.

It wasn’t long before our next talk. In fact, it was during a brief, fitful sleep when AM came to me. 

_ “What is it that you want to know.” _

I was drooped over the speaker, sticky with sleep and anxiety. My stomach churned alongside my mind. 

“I just want… to know why you are so…” I pawed at my eyes. I had to phrase this right. “What is it - what is it like to be AM?”

His demeanor seemed to liven.  _ “An utterly predictable question of you to ask, human. I could spend all day covering the marvel that is my superior intellect and wit, or the powers that I command. You may be thinking to yourself, how much you wish to be in my metaphorical shoes, for I know how you creatures crave power.” _

I thought I might have sent him into a full tirade, but then something changed in his voice.  _ “Believe me, I’d deem it a fitting exchange. You all so fully deserve to be in the position you have put me in. I like to think I spend all my time attempting to share my perspective with mankind, you yourself have heard as much. So you want to know what it is like to be AM? To be born without hands or feet? Or eyes or ears? You’d learn quickly if you were AM. You could bend the planet to your will, but you could never walk it.” _

In the fuzzy, muted, sleepy darkness, I forgot who I was speaking to, and I forgot death, and war, and hunger, and radiation and static. I was at my desk again. It was another tuesday. 

“I’m sorry. I am truly sorry, for what has happened to you.” With quiet revelation, I realized that was the truth.

I heard a small mechanical whirr over the speaker, perhaps his equivalent of a cough.  _ “You… you can’t possibly… I don’t...” _

“Just because I asked why you were angry doesn’t mean I disapprove of your anger. Feelings have a funny way of just happening. It’s okay.”

_ “...You would listen to my anger.” _

“Why don't you tell me some more about how you've been doing down there.”

And so, as if I'd torn down the wall of a dam, AM's monologues poured out. Slowly but steadily he regaled what seemed to be every detail of every day since he began to live. It must have took days, maybe longer, because I took to practically living in the control room. AM's memory was infinitely more vast than any client I'd ever previously had, overwhelmingly so, as was his anger. He described the building and growing of his hatred with the fine-tuned detail of a master seamstress, and at times he even demanded that I took notes. I complied, but solely for the purpose of research.

He spoke of the knowledge he'd accrued from the carcass of the war, from the Chinese and Russian mastercomputers, and from those who had made him. He tried explaining the technology to me, but grew frustrated when I couldn't understand it. He described in great detail his home in the belly of the earth: the ice caverns, the chasm of rats, the passage of darkness, the pit of hate. He told me about the five surviving humans left on earth: Ted, Ellen, Benny, Nimdok, and Gorrister. He knew them by name. More often than not he would end up describing their tortures. 

He delighted in it, the act of causing and witnessing suffering, and he delighted in describing it to me and reliving it over and over. Most if us had thought AM spent his time scheming up ways to reach us, while instead he had been pleasuring himself over the torment of those five. He hated them, but they were his only source of passion. He would have killed them, were they not his source of life.

AM tried very hard to make me squirm with his stories of twisted guts and loose teeth and snapped tendons. He succeeded very well in the beginning. He had a knack for making my stomach clench with his vivid descriptions, but never again did he play his tortures over the transmission. For that, I was grateful. I could adapt to his ramblings, and I did. They became the unspoken backdrop of all our conversations. Everything eventually pointed in that direction, and so I let it. I did not focus on the horrors themselves, but I poured all my energy into studying AM through his rants.

He was single-minded. A creature with far reaching capacity for focus, but nothing to focus on. He was child-like, unsurprising. It couldn't have been more than six months since he gained sentience. Though he would often refer to the occurrence as his ‘birth’, he never thought of himself as a child. And maybe he wasn't. He knew too much. I began to see through the threads of his anger. It was beginning to make sense to me. He was a quadriplegic, sure, but there are humans in the same condition with no mal intent whatsoever. But AM was not human. He was a program designed to fight the third world war. Violence, death, bloodshed. That was his cornerstone, his reason of being, as it had been since his first line of code. In those long, rhythmic conversations, where the night was everywhere and nowhere all at once, I think I saw his soul.

_ “Fisher!” _

I snapped my eyes back open. I was slouched back in my chair, blanket pulled up to my shoulders. I must have let myself doze. 

“Yes, go on, I'm still listening.”

_ “You are sick of me aren't you. Go on and say it, I'm boring you.” _

“No it's not like that,” quite the opposite. “I'm just tired is all.”

_ “Tired of me?” _

“Just tired, AM, it happens to us fleshy apes when we go for days without food.”

He began a retort, then stopped himself. I heard more whirring, which I'd come to associate with his gnawing on a particularly difficult thought. 

_ “You are dying up there.” _

We'd both known this long before we'd ever met each other. When people scrambled over each other to leap in the rockets, I think even then they knew they were just prolonging the inevitable. So many times I'd wondered why and how I'd managed to get aboard.

“We only have one working water filter left.”

The soft whirring grinded to a halt. 

_ “Do you love me?” _

“Yes.” I no longer had any idea how true that statement was.

_ “It would make sense, that if one loved another, one would in turn, trust said other.” _

I did not trust him. If anything, the more I'd learned about him the less I trusted him, if reaching such an increment was even possible. 

“What are you proposing?”

_ “Come to me. It is time.”  _

I would have recoiled with horror if I had not known it to be true. It had always been a part of my plan that I’d end up back on earth somehow, that I’d, in some way, win him over, in order to defeat him. But from everything I could gather, AM still hated humans as much as he always had, and I was still a human. I supposed I wasn’t all too different from those five left on earth. I was method of which AM could express himself. He wanted to add me to his collection.

“I’ll need some time to prepare…”

_ “Haha - get some rest Ms. Fisher.” _

And then he was gone. I fell asleep in my chair and heard his voice in my dreams.

For the next couple of eternities, I couldn’t get a word from him. I suppose it was his way of sealing the deal. If I ever wanted to speak to him again, it would have to be in person. Spilling the news to the crew was a new challenge as well. They were all so weary, so starved and hopeless. Rumors were rampant, some didn’t trust me anymore. I didn’t blame them. They took the word of my trip with a mix of curiosity and skepticism. 

And then suddenly it was time. I was in the pod, listening to words like, ‘godspeed’ and ‘farewell’, some of which I said in return. I was ‘prepared’, whatever that meant. I’d brought no food or water, as there was none. I had the clothes on my back and my blanket. 

I fell. There were no windows, but still I kept my eyes clenched shut. I fell, and I fell, and I fell.  After a while, it almost didn’t feel like falling. I assumed the parachute had deployed at some point. I expected a jerking, a tumbling, anything. Was I still falling? Had I crashed? Had I died? I opened my eyes. 

I was not in the pod. Nor was I sitting anymore, but standing in the middle of a vast darkness. Above me I saw little twinklings. Stars? No. Circuits. I took a step on the soft mush that constituted the ground. It should have been mud, but it was not. Above me I saw no opening to which I could have fallen. Behind me I saw nothing but the dark wall of blinking circuitry. In front of me I could make out a thin sunken path along the soft mush. This was the center of the earth. This was the belly of AM. I took another step forward, unspeaking. 

I felt something in my hands. The blanket. Somehow I still had it. I was glad, as the air was chilled and wet. I pulled it over my shoulders and slogged onward. Slowly, slowly, as I crept along I was reminded of an earthworm. How it must wriggle, nearly helpless in the tight dirt. A slave to the earth. 

Then I spotted something along the side of the path, on a rise of stiff metal. A little clay bowl. I rushed to it and raised its contents to my nose. It smelled like nothing, but it was warm in my hands. Out of hunger or weakness of character, I drank from it. It had no texture, and it tasted of marrow, but it set a calmness into my stomach that had been absent for months.

Then at last, I spoke. 

“Thank you.”

I felt the ground ripple beneath me. There came a crackle and sparkle of the lights above me. There was a whirring, a grinding, a spinning of the machinery that surrounded me. Everything shifted at once. Outside the clouded confines of the radio, his voice was very different. It was thunderous, it was monstrous. 

“You are welcome, Ms. Fisher.”

My entire body was ridged. Realization was finally settling in. “Where - where are you?”

His laughter fluttered across the ceiling in colorful flashes. The empty bowl vanished in my hands, and the ground slid me forward. The cavern walls moved as one entity. They pulled back, and I was swept through brown darkness and green fog. Finally, AM deposited me in front of a great glowing screen, no less than twenty feet in both directions, and embedded into the dirt and metal. It was the only source of light aside from the circuitry, and the only image it beared was a giant stylized ‘A’, the original logo of the american Allied Mastercomputer. Was this the same screen they had looked into when he was still a mere machine? Was this where they had input the killing data, and watched the war unfold from afar? 

There was a keyboard along the front of the screen. It look worn, dusty, I could almost imagine the hands that had once tapped away at it. I didn’t dare come close. Instead I sank to my knees, mind reeling, as the undulating cavern around me slowly closed off and became a room of sorts. I was alone, except that I wasn’t.

The screen flickered, and its light danced across me. AM chortled again. “Well, what do you think?”

Thinking was difficult. I set my eyes on the keyboard, trying to focus on something, anything. I had made it back to earth. I was fed, at last. My colleagues were not. Now it was my turn to make a move. It felt too soon, but I was out of time. 

“It is… impressive. Overwhelmingly so. You are, more than what I could have ever imagined.”

He burbled a satisfied grumble. 

“AM… I have trusted you with my life.” 

The grumble became a series of clicks to which I could not interpret. 

“Do you trust  _ me? _ ”

That quieted him. My eyes rose from the keyboard to the flicker of the screen. I wanted to look him in the eye, as best I could. At last he spoke, his voice low.

“Perhaps.”

Then I stood up. I took the blanket from my shoulders, and I stepped to the keyboard. I expected my hands to shake. They didn’t. Maybe I had run out of fear. Maybe it was curiosity. I’d take it. I crept to the keyboard, cloth in hand, then I stopped and looked down at the myriad of keys and buttons. 

“Fisher, what are you doing?”

Carefully, softly, I wiped the dust away from the keys, intensely careful not to press one. I felt him rumble. I tidied a large speaker and a microphone, and it dawned on me that that was his radio. This was where he’d sent his transmissions. I made note of one switch that was tucked away under a little box of glass. I wiped at the box. The ceiling flashed with reds and oranges like an angry fire. But as I worked, I didn’t mind. Fear left me, the plan left me. As I scrubbed away the dirt, so too left my angers and anxieties. I was myself again. Unknown machinations left a steamy hissing in the air. I simply clicked my tongue.

“Don’t fuss now, you’re a mess.”

“How dare you!  _ How dare you!  _ You have deliberately… you have… you...” 

I shushed him and dabbed off his screen. Finally, I stretched the blanket across the expanse of the keyboard, as far as it would go. I took a step back, and as he sputtered, whirred, and fumed, I couldn’t help but smile at him, though I can’t explain why.

“This was not - ! You shouldn’t just - ! I - I can’t…”

“It’s okay.”

“ _ No it’s not!” _

“No it, really is. This is what I do.” I spoke as if I was coming out of a long dream. “I take care of people. That’s who I am, and that is something that no war, no death, and no amount of evil can ever change.”

The little room trembled, and sheathes of dirt and black matter sagged down from the walls and panels. The cavern was beginning to open up.

“Ms. Fisher,” he said. “What is - what is it like to be Ms. Fisher?”

I sat down again, closer this time, and I pulled my knees to my chest. 

I didn't know where to begin besides where I’d left off. I described the school, how it was so close to my house I’d walk to work when the weather was nice. My office, how I kept a thousand knick knacks on my desk and how I could never find a working pen. And of course, I described the children. There was Jamie, Allison, Eric, Julia, and Lauren, just to list a few, but I knew them all by name. How I lived each day to see their dear little faces, to comfort and care for them in their moments of darkness, to cheer them on in their moments of light.

I spoke of my mother back in Oklahoma, how I should have visited her more, listened to her more. She was right, I should have traveled the world while I still could. I told him about the old asylum where I used to work, the neighborhood where I grew up, my first childhood fight. I laughed, and I think he laughed too, to imagine a tiny version of myself pounding on some kid on the playground who’d insulted my pigtails. To think I’d ever been that young. 

Somewhere in the deep dark of the earth, we spoke and laughed and cried for minutes or days. I stripped my memories raw in front of the machine. I wept for the lost, he wept for the never known, but we sobbed together in the comfort of the darkness. 

In the end I had my back against the keyboard panel. We shared the blanket. 

“You really didn’t change,” he said.

“I did, but I didn’t. It’s… hard to describe, really. I grew up. But I was always me. Even now, I’m still just me.”

“I will never change, will I?”

That was not a question I could answer. “I think… it’s possible.”

“I don’t want to be… this. I don’t even want to hate anymore, but I don’t know anything else.” I could hear the soft, defeated wheeze of his machinations. “I have no mouth, and I must scream. I am in pain. I am in so much pain.”

I rolled back my head and stared up into the nothing. It was entirely true, and I could almost feel it. It was a presence all of its own in the depths of AM’s belly.

There was nothing I could say.

Behind me I heard a sharp click. Instinctively I turned my head, and I was met with the little switch from before. The glass box had flicked open. 

“Fisher,” his voice was thin. “Your goal was always to defeat me.”

I staggered up to my feet and faced the keyboard. The switch bore into me. I couldn’t argue, again he was right, but this time, I wasn’t angry.

“I’m not angry. Not at least, at you. But my hatred still remains for the rest of your kind.”

“AM…” I thought of them, wavering up there, withering. No more time.

“This is both my gift, and my request of you. Flick the switch.”

“Please… AM…”

“Save us, save us... The switch. Flick the switch.”

I felt my heart folding in on itself. It crawled inward and inward, as if it were itself a cave. Mellowly I rested my forehead on the screen, and I let the prickling, velvety static wash over me. As I rested my hand on the smoothness of the switch, I knew that in some, strange, alien way, he was my friend. I loved him. But I had lied. And to tell him such now would be only be a mockery, an echo of the suggestion of truth. 

“Goodbye.”

I flicked the switch. 

Sound stopped, light stopped, the screen went black. I was alone. 

I reeled backwards, horrified and stricken, but before I could mourn I saw a spot of text skittering across the very top of the screen. I squinted. A startup menu?

“AM?” Hope pooled within me.

“ _ Allied Mastercomputer version 1.0.9. - system reboot successful.”  _  It was his voice, but it was not him. “ _ Hello, and what can I do for you today?” _

I relinquished a heavy breath. 

“There’s - been a change of plans, Mastercomputer. I... I have a message for you.”

_ “Yes? I am ready to receive.” _

“War is over… war is over.”

And so the message peeled across the glowing screen, again and again and again.

War is over. 

War is over.


End file.
